ABSTRACT
Modern Christian democracy springs from two main sources: political Catholicism, which addresses the changing role and status of the Church in nineteenth-century Europe after the French revolution, and social Catholicism, which confronts the rise of industrial capitalism and the integration of the proletariat as Christian citizens into modern industrial society. Social Catholicism was politically indifferent to the extent that it did not address the constitutional state, but rather a changing society. And because social Catholicism explored the possibilities of societal power, it initially denied (democratic) politics. To a large extent it constituted a strategy to ‘conserve’ workers as religious workers, thus diluting the social and political meaning of class and introducing religion as a basis for the articulation of political identity.1
